Dental Students’ Perception and Anxiety Levels during their First Local Anesthetic Injection

Background: Student-to-student administration of local anesthesia (LA) has been widely used as the teaching modality to train preclinical dental students. However, studies assessing students’ outlook towards their first injection were limited. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate students’ perception and anxiety levels towards their first LA injection.
Methods: Sixty three pre-clinical dental students swapped their roles as both operator and respondents in relation to their first supraperiosteal injection. After being injected, the students conferred their opinion and experiences to the questionnaire based on the five point Likert’s scale and indicated their anxiety levels based on the Interval Scale of Anxiety response (ISAR). Their perception was described using frequencies and percentages and anxiety levels were statistically analysed using one way analysis variance and paired t test.
Results: Students learning LA techniques directly on human subjects depicted not only greater confidence in them but also increased anxiety levels. The anxiety levels were found to be high before and during injection in both operator and respondent.
Conclusion: The students’ preferred the use of preclinical models rather than student to student administration for their first LA injection exercise. Based on the results obtained, we recommend the need of preclinical simulation model in LA training program.